Thursday, 25 July 2013

How to Properly Structure Your Business Blog

How to Properly Structure Your Business Blog

Link to Tips Blogger

How to Properly Structure Your Business Blog

Posted: 24 Jul 2013 12:43 PM PDT

If you’ve spent any time at all checking out business blogs online you’ve probably discovered that no two are the same. The best business blogs are distinctive, so the brand is fully on display and the site cannot be confused with the online home of any other company. Good business blogs find a way to be entertaining, so they can hopefully attract new customers and laypeople, not just the superfans or experts in your industry. And good business blogs tie together every other online home for your company, be it one of the social networks, a video site or a more formal e-commerce store. All of those details are crucial, but if you’re ready to design a blog for your business you’ve got to make sure all of your choices follow a path to success. Nothing can be accidental, and everything must flow with a purpose. Here are a couple of tips for how to properly structure your business blog.

First of all, design a schedule that will keep the blog active and exciting. Nothing is worse than a blog with intermittent blog posts. If your plan is just to write something new when you’re inspired by an idea you won’t see your work create the results you desire. Blogs are all about consistency. Audiences won’t keep coming back unless they can rely on steady blogging. You don’t have to write a novel’s worth of content every single day, but if you can’t commit to updating the blog at least once a week you should use your efforts elsewhere. To help you and your staff through the process, create a calendar specifically for the blog. Everyone who is contributing can be assigned a day, and can collect the topics there when they are hit with inspiration. This way you’ll know the blog is being updated, and can track what sort of topics your company will cover in the next several weeks.

Speaking of topics, the structure of each blog post is crucial for a site’s growth. Open up some of your favorite business blogs, the ones you are looking to for inspiration, and see how they compare. You’ll notice that the paragraphs within a blog post are relatively short, and frequently separated by images that contain clickable links. You’ll notice headings on each section, and the frequent use of lists, graphs and bullet points. This is entirely by design. Keeping things short, sweet and visual maintains the reader’s attention and insures he’ll come back for more. Make sure you’ve got an editorial system in place as well, so blog posts don’t go out with any spelling or grammar issues. And if you really want to make your blogging effective research your topics through the use of keywords. If you know people within your core demographic are searching for answers to the same questions over and over again, it’s a good idea to make that answer the subject of a blog post.

So those are the structural basics, but how do you make a decent post into something greater? You don’t want your blog to be ‘good enough’, not if you really want it to take off. The blogs that go viral and win web awards always take it to the next level. Start every blog post with something personal and engaging that draws your readers it. The introduction to your post could be shocking, sad, hilarious or simply very smart, but it should always contain a hook that forces people to keep reading. And always structure these posts with a clear purpose. You can employ a great company like HigherVisibility.com to improve your SEO, but if you don’t have goals for all of that traffic you’ll be disappointed with the numbers. Focus on launching your personal brand as a leader in your industry, on increasing your readers’ sharing of your blog amongst their social networks or on generating a large quantity of leads for your business. But if you try to do all three simultaneously you might risk missing the mark on all points.

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